Reader Mike D directs us to this very interesting New Scientist article:
Our world may be a giant hologram
The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level.
The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard ‘t Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.
The research cited in the article, measurements taken as part of the GEO600 experiment outside of Hanover, Germany, fall well short of proving that we live in a hologram. What we have so far is some background noise very similar to the background noise predicted by Craig Hogan, director of the Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics, in his description of the ultimate “graininess” of the universe.
So out at the edge of the universe, you will find the “real” universe: a two-dimensional structure with resolution down to the Planck length. Here in the (fake? shadow? projected?) less-real universe, life is a lot blurrier than that, as our “pixels” are much, much bigger — 19 orders of magnitude bigger, if I’m reading it correctly. So we live in this big, blurry, 3D rendering of the real, much smaller and more fine-grained universe.
I’m not sure how significant this is. It all sounds kind of strange, but then the universe has to work somehow or other, doesn’t it?
A topic for discussion: would such a structure of the universe — if proved — tend to support the suggestion that we are living in a computer simulation, or would it be of no relevance?
